Yoshi and the Mysterious Book hands-on: a whimsical adventure of discoveries

Playing on wonder and curiosity

• 🦖 Yoshi and the Mystrious Book is a whimsical game all about wonder and making discoveries

• ✍🏻 Hand-drawn storybook-style graphics and stop-motion animation look magical

• 👹 The Mysterious Book is full of curious creatures like Shy Gusys, Little Mouser, Crazee Dayzee, and more

• 🔍 Uncover small discoveries by interacting with creatures

• 🤯 Big discoveries completes leves instead of 2D platforming

• 💔 No health or damage to worry about

• 😈 Yoshi will still run into enemies, including Bowser Jr. and Kamek

Yoshi is truly the star of Nintendo’s most experimental games. Yoshi has been turned into yarn and paper, and now it’s diving into a new Mysterious Book for an adventure all about making discoveries. Yoshi and the Mysterious Book is all about the feeling of wonder and making discoveries in a world of colorful characters. It’s so fitting that this tale is portrayed with a hand-drawn art style and stop-motion animation that makes it look like a storybook brought to life.

I got to play Yoshi and the Mysterious Book for almost two hours and discovered all sorts of interesting creators, both old and new, like Shy Guys, Little Mouser, and a flower-wearing baby called Crazee Dayzee. You’ll also run into Bowser Jr. and Kamek, who are up to no good, but Yoshi and the Mysterious Book is more of a feel-good, relaxing game that’ll keep your curiosity engaged with new creatures and wacky ways to interact with them.

✍🏻 Hand-drawn art style. I love the whimsy of Yoshi and the Mysterious Book’s hand-drawn storybook-style graphics. It gives the world more texture than smooth polygons would, and it also adds a bit more depth to truly realize the 2.5D world. Yoshi and pretty much anything moving in the world are also stop-motion animated, which sells the look of drawings being magically brought to life. There isn’t any perspective changing like in the previous Yoshi’s Crafted World, but the world feels more alive in the mysterious book, thanks to all the creatures you’ll encounter.

🔍 A word to discover. While Yoshi and the Mysterious Book comes off as a traditional 2D platformer, the goal in this game isn’t to make it to the end of a level, but rather to uncover discoveries around all the creatures you’ll meet in the world. You’ll meet new and old characters like Shy Guys, Little Mouser, Crazee Dayzee, and more.

Interacting with them yields small discoveries like Crazee Dayzee tastes sweet when you grab them with your tongue, or Scatterpuffs can help break up large rocks. What really ends the levels are the big discoveries you make by escorting all the Shy Guys home or completing a long melody by jumping on frogs that croak with a musical tone when you land on them. Also, after discovering each creature, you can name them with their default name or one of your choosing, in case you thought Shy Guys really should have been named Gary.

➕ But wait, there’s more. Going through levels is pretty quick. I went through eight of them, discovering creatures and solving puzzles. However, you’ll find even more challenging discoveries by going back into levels. Mr. E will give you a little one-line hint as to what you need to do, but if you’re really stumped, you could spend all the stars you’ve earned from making discoveries to get a hint. This just continues Nintendo’s latest and greatest trend of adding more challenging replayability to post-game content, as in its other games, such as Mario Odyssey and Donkey Kong Bananza.

💔 No health, no problem. There’s no damage in Yoshi and the Mysterious Book, so you can fully focus on completing discoveries. While you don’t have to worry about losing health, Yoshi still runs into some enemies like a bug that burrows into watermelons and turns its seeds into bullets. To take down this creature, you’ll have to grab a watermelon of your own and shoot its seeds to strip away the bug’s armor and then dispatch it.

The bigger bad of the game is Bowser Jr. and Kamek. In a “boss level” of the game, I had to fight them while they flew around in a sort of UFO ship. Meanwhile, I was riding on the back of a boar that could spin its snout like a drill to burrow through the ground.

• Up next: Xbox Game Pass Ultimate gets a surprise price cut, but at the expense of Call of Duty

Kevin Lee is The Shortcut’s Creative Director. Follow him on Twitter @baggingspam.